"To discover to the world something which deeply concerns it, and of which it was previously ignorant; to prove to it that it had been mistaken on some vital point of temporal or spiritual interest, is as important a service as a human being can render to his fellow creatures..."
John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty"

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Chief Justice John Roberts' administration of the presidential oath to Barack Obama was far from smooth. Early reports differ in saying who stumbled: NBC andABC say the flub was Roberts', while the AP says it was Obama's. I think both men were a bit nervous, and the error that emerged from their momentary disfluency came down to a problem of adverbial placement.

The Constitution gives the oath as:

"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

Here is the transcript as given by NBC and ABC:

ROBERTS: Are you prepared to take the oath, Senator?OBAMA: I am.ROBERTS: I, Barack Hussein Obama…OBAMA: I, Barack…ROBERTS: … do solemnly swear…OBAMA: I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear…ROBERTS: … that I will execute the office of president to the United States faithfully…OBAMA: … that I will execute…ROBERTS: … faithfully the office of president of the United States…OBAMA: … the office of president of the United States faithfully…ROBERTS: … and will to the best of my ability…OBAMA: … and will to the best of my ability…ROBERTS: … preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.OBAMA: … preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.ROBERTS: So help you God?OBAMA: So help me God.ROBERTS: Congratulations, Mr. President.

In the embedded clause of the oath, the adverb faithfully is properly positioned after the auxiliary will (1). If you miss the adverb as it is placed in the official wording, you have two more chances for inserting it in a coherent fashion: placingfaithfully after the verb execute (2) or placing it at the end of the clause (3):

that I will 1 execute 2 the office of President of the United States 3

Roberts does indeed miss his opportunity to put faithfully in position 1, perhaps thrown by Obama repeating the opening phrase of the oath earlier than he expected. In Roberts' first attempt, faithfully ends up in clause-final position 3. Obama seems to realize that the placement is wrong, but repeats the first part of the clause all the way through to the verb: that I will execute. There's no possibility of getting faithfully back to position 1 at this point, but Roberts gets as close as he can by placing it in position 2, immediately after the verb, in his second attempt. Obama ignores the self-repair, however, and ends up repeating the misplaced version that Roberts originally supplied, with faithfully in clause-final position 3.

From the perspective of speech act theory and performativity, we could go on to consider whether felicity conditions failed for this particular speech act, since the wording was not actually the official one. But the question is moot: the oath is not actually performative, since Barack Obama became president immediately after 12 noon (before Roberts had even started to administer the oath), as several network commentators observed. And Jan Crawford Greenberg of ABC provides a historical precedent:

It's worth pointing out that Chief Justice William Howard Taft, who had been President himself, also flubbed the oath when he was swearing in Herbert Hoover in 1929. When Taft administered the oath, he said, "preserve, maintain and defend the Constitution," instead of "preserve, PROTECT, and defend." So where Roberts flipped a couple of words, Taft substituted an entirely new one.

There was one other minor slip-up on Roberts' part: in his first run-through of the embedded clause, he got a preposition wrong, saying "I will execute the office of president to the United States," rather than of. A less noticeable speech error, but nonetheless the type of thing that happens when one speaks from memory without written prompts, as Roberts apparently did.

[Update, 9:30 pm: Obama was just asked about the oath flub on ABC in a brief backstage interview at the Neighborhood Ball.

Robin Roberts: During the taking the oath of office, Chief Justice Roberts inadvertently switched some words up. You were trying to help him out there a little bit, it seemed, with your look.

Pres. Obama: Oh, listen, I think we're, uh, we're up there, we've got a lot of stuff on our minds, and he actually I think helped me out on a couple of, uh, stanzas there. So overall I think it went relatively smoothly and I'm very grateful to him.

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